The son of a photographer who died in the First World War, he attended secondary school and joined Munich Police Headquarters in 1919. He took evening classes to catch up on his university admission examinations before going on to study law and political science in Munich from 1927. After completing his legal training and passing the state examinations, he was taken on as a government assistant in the senior police service in 1934, where he worked first for the criminal investigation department and then for the Bavarian Political Police in Munich. In the fall of 1937 he transferred to Berlin State Police Headquarters. In the Reich capital he quickly made a career for himself in the shadow of Gestapo chief Heinrich Müller, whom he knew well from Munich.
Having joined the SA in the summer of 1933, Panzinger became a member of the Nazi party in 1937 and joined the SS in 1939. Now an SS ‘Assault Unit Leader’ (Sturmbannführer), he joined the Reich Security Main Office (RSHA) in August 1940 where he was initially deployed for a year as a special representative of the security police at the German embassy in Sofia. He then took over as head of Department Group IV A (‘Combat of the Enemy’) at the RSHA. Among other things, he coordinated investigations into resistance organizations such as the ‘Red Orchestra’. In addition, his department organized the segregation and murder of certain Soviet prisoners of war (Jews, communist functionaries) and evaluated the reports submitted by the paramilitary death squads (Einsatzgruppen). In September 1943, Panzinger was promoted to SS Senior Leader (Oberführer), taking over leadership of Einsatzgruppe A and took on the post of Commander of the Security Police and the Security Service (SD) for the territory of the ‘Reich Commissariat of Eastland’. In this position he played a leading role in the dissolution of the last ghettos, the murder of their inhabitants and the terror perpetrated against the civilian population under the guise of combating partisans. In June 1944 Panzinger briefly returned to Department IV A before being appointed head of the Reich Criminal Investigation Department (Department V) in August 1944.
After the end of the war he was taken prisoner by the Soviets and sentenced to 25 years of forced labor in Moscow in 1952. After being allowed to return to West Germany in October 1955, he worked for the Federal Intelligence Service as a senior civil servant for reassignment. In 1958 he was charged by Munich Public Prosecutor’s Office with involvement in the murder of the French prisoner of war General Maurice Mesny in January 1945. Panzinger committed suicide in August 1959, when he was due to be arrested.
